Carriers continually attempt to increase availability/reliability in their network and to optimize use of protection bandwidth in their networks. Protection of optical channels can be achieved by different mechanisms such as a 1+1 protection mechanism, Optical Channel Dedicated Protection Ring (OCh-DPRing) mechanism, or Optical Channel Shared Protection Ring (OCh-SPRing) mechanism.
A standard OCh-SPRing mechanism provides efficient usage of protection bandwidth for certain traffic patterns because the protection bandwidth is shared amongst the circuits on the working bandwidth.